Going to Lay in the Grass

Once a month, my three housemates and I travel up from our post in Clonard, Co. Wexford and the Diocese of Ferns to invade Dublin. Sometimes we hop on the Wexford Bus; sometimes we catch a lift from a friend of ours. That friend is a priest who supervises primary school education in the diocese, and he is part of the community in Dublin that we join each month.

The University of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) has become an incredibly robust and constantly growing outreach across America, pulling in tons of incredibly talented post-grads from Notre Dame and all across the country. Those who accept their invitations to join ACE spend two years in Catholic education; they dedicate their summers to coursework toward a Masters in Education while spending two academic years as Catholic school teachers in under-resourced Catholic schools all across the country, from Oakland, CA, to Richmond, VA, to Mission, TX.

ACE also includes advocacy and fellowship networks in many different places, and the O'Connell House/Keough-Naughton Centre in Dublin hosts a unique version of this group. People who work in Catholic education in Ireland, mostly as teachers and administrators, gather together at O'Connell House on one Friday every month, under the leadership of an American Notre Dame/ACE alumnus and his Irish wife, to share a mass, dinner, and some conversation. Since the House of Brigid is a group of Notre Dame alumni that benefited from Catholic education and continues to serve it - in the primary schools of our home parish of Clonard - we join the community as well, invited to serve primarily as the music ministers for these humble, homey masses.

At the end of each academic year, the ACE Community in Dublin commissions two young Irish people who have been selected to travel to America to study at Notre Dame and serve a Catholic school as teachers in ACE. This commissioning mass is the finale for each year, and a few weeks ago, we traveled up to Dublin to join the community for this final mass to send forth two Irish girls to Our Lady's University.

Our celebrant for the mass was a man named Fr. Michael Drumm. He sensed the mood of the mass - an intimate group of less than 50, including the families and friends of these two girls, in the parlor of a very old Irish house, stationed in plastic chairs around a makeshift altar and the hearth of a seldom-used fireplace. Fr. Drumm ministered to us accordingly, and his homily was a bit like hearing your dad tell a story by the fireside on a cozy night at home.

The centerpiece of his homily, at least in the way I heard it, was a simple reflection on grass. You ready for this? Here's three simple facts.

1. Grass grows.
2. No one has ever seen grass grow.
3. If you laid down in a field for a long time, the growth would envelop you.

Ok, father, we've all heard the cliches about grass growing, water boiling, etc., and we just heard the Sower and the Seed parable for the Gospel - what else ya got? But this wasn't just the standard use of a tired metaphor. He was trying to convey a sense of what a teacher should strive for in his or her work, their ministry. This really struck me as a tremendous way to preach patience alongside presence.

You see, we usually start each month's gathering with a round of introductions before the opening song of the mass, and this month we bypassed the usual convention in favor of focusing on our two honored guests. The introductions for the four of us youngens from Wexford are usually laugh-inducing, four of giving the same short schticks, though I sometimes slip in a joke, like "I'm the product of 17 years of Catholic education." But this time, I had a different introduction that would have put me squarely alongside these two gals - "I'm Dan, and I'm going to be a Catholic high school teacher and campus minister, starting in August." So secretly, I was being phantomly commissioned all the while.

Fr. Drumm's words cut straight through to me. I had never prepared myself explicitly to accept a teaching job, figuring it may come as an extra responsibility to my main pursuit of being a campus minister but wouldn't be my main occupation. But here I was, a few weeks in to knowing that I'll begin teaching theology to 14-to-16-year-olds imminently and beginning to regularly muse and hypothesize over how I'll undertake the ministry.

I already am committed to a vocabulary of ministry, presence, service. I've assumed a mindset of spirited commitment to ministry, no matter what the medium or "job" for it is. I remain imperfect - crotchety, critical, particular, opinionated, moderately moderate - but the vocabulary I persist in using during prayer/reflection, conversation, and job interviews indicates the ideal I am pursuing and the reality I try to enflesh. And Fr. Drumm provided us a metaphor that encapsulated so much of what my friend, the one who referred me to her school and now my employer, had previously told me: "Just love them."

As I've spent more and more time in ministry, the sower/seed metaphors have been consoling. You must be willing to sow the seed and not insist on seeing it grow. You have to be willing to pass the garden on to others to water and harvest. You also have to know that you're seeing the fruits of seeds sown by other ministers. We are truly a Church when we work together in such a way, trusting in the mystical bond we share as Christ's Body, knowing that the guiding hand of our Church can make such a difference.

Here, in Fr. Drumm's observation, I find new depth. This metaphor preaches patience: go and be there, knowing that a difference may not come instantly or quickly or even measurably. It preaches presence: commit to laying down, to being in the thick of it, going on to the front lines. Most of all, it preaches certitude: grass can, does, and will grow, even though no one has ever seen it. Grace is often invisible to our eyes, especially in the very live moments in which it unfolds right before our eyes. But we know the grass grows, and we must remember that a commitment to tend to it and spend significant time with it yields results, results that are reliant on something - Some One - greater than any one of us "gardeners."

My friend's exhortations about my new school warned against orthodox catechism-thumping, indoctrination, and strict lectures on tradition. Instead, her insights centered on committing to a thorough presence, a desire to provide a sturdy and substantial counter-culture of faith, on that will give teenagers an alternative to what one scholar calls "moral therapeutic deism" and give them an attractive invitation to thoughtful Christian life and a lived faith.

Here, Fr. Drumm showed me just what I must do. I need to go lay in the grass, accept that I may not see it grow, and remember that if I lay there long enough, the growth will overwhelm me.